Resistance, Resilience, and Revival: Jewish Ethiopian Music and Identity in Israel

Olivier Tourny (1)

1 IDEMEC - Institut d'ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative

For centuries a Jewish community-the Beta Israel-has lived in the highlands of Ethiopia, resisting the wishes of the local Christian authorities to convert. In recent decades (1980s-1990s), this same community has migrated in its entirety to Israel, resisting the wishes of the rabbinical authorities to fully abandon their religious traditions. An anthropo-historical approach is necessary to clarify the context and the issues at stake, and with that in mind, this chapter will examine why and how the arrival of the Jews from Ethiopia revived some of the darker realities that simmer in the history of modern Israel: ostracism, racism, and internal colonialism towards some of its own Jewish minorities. Yet the case of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel demonstrates a particular resilience. Politically, after years of silence and suffering, it demonstrated its ability to express its voice and claim its rights within Israeli society. On the religious front (which is never far from the political one in Israel), after years of censorship of its ritual practices by the Israeli Rabbinate rejecting their archaic and deviant aspects in relation to the canons of normative Judaism, this community will fight step by step to have its own Judaism recognized. What's more, by underlining the proximity of its practices to those of biblical times, this community in turn questions the "purity" of today's rabbinic Judaism, forged gradually after the destruction of Jerusalem's Second Temple (70 CE). In this chapter, we argue that Ethiopian Jewish liturgical music-the zema-constitutes the soul of the community, and as such has served as ferment, cement and banner in the struggle for a rediscovered and renewed identity within Israel's communities. To this end, a prelude will serve to contextualize and present this zema at the time of the Ethiopian migration. The first part, entitled Some questions, will address a series of issues raised by Ethiopian Judaism in terms of origin, identity and survival in the land of Israel. The second part, entitled Blackness, will show how, in a climate of state racism, the skin color of Ethiopians has induced different strategies of existence in a new territory populated mainly by white people. The third part-Roots as a new colour-will look in detail at the various stages in the revival of Ethiopian Judaism in a recomposed space and a calmer context. The conclusion of this chapter will illustrate how a heritage preservation program has finally been transformed into an applied ethnomusicology.

Mots clés: Resistance through Music; Jewish Ethiopian; Contemporary Israel; Who is a Jew; Internal Colonialism

Domaines: Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Olivier Tourny. Resistance, Resilience, and Revival: Jewish Ethiopian Music and Identity in Israel. E. Johnson-Williams; R.-M Kok; Y. Liao. The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism. Johnson-Williams, E., Kok, R-M. & Liao, Y. (eds.). Oxford University Press (forthcoming, 2024), Oxford University Press, In press, The Oxford Handbook. ⟨hal-04371303⟩